4.0 CONFERENCE BANNERS

Conference messages, or banners, are shown to users in the PicoSpan interface when they enter or
leave a conference. They are a way of welcoming people to the conference, letting them know
about important information or general announcements, and saying good-bye to them when they
leave. There are five basic types in the text interface which give you varying degrees of control
over when, and how often, a given message is seen. We'll cover them in the order in which they
would appear to a user joining your conference for the first time. (It's a good rule of thumb to
keep these messages fairly short -- eight lines or less is best.) Those members of your conference
who participate via the Engaged interface will not see the five basic banners. You may display
announcements for them with one special banner, which is covered in section 4.6.

You'll be put into the same editor you normally use for topic responses. When you're finished
typing your welcome message, enter it just as you would a topic response and you'll get a prompt
like this:

Ok to install?

Type: y ...to install the message.

Type: n ...to abandon it.

You will then be returned to an OK prompt.

To see the welcome message without changing it,

Type: d welcome (short for "display welcome").

Only hosts may change the conference banners, but any user may display them by using
d welcome at any time. To get a look at how other conferences use particular banners, you can
use the d commands in various places around the system to compare. All of the following
messages will display in the same manner.

on the first line of the message (be sure to include the "" symbols), enter about six lines
of information (or whatever you did for the standard login banner mentioned in section 4.3),
then

type: </PRE>

on the last line.

NOTE: Links to other web documents will work as active, clickable links
in this banner, but please avoid things like large or numerous graphics
that could slow down the loading of the conference page for your
participants.